


Bit Shoot

by tatersalad5001



Series: For Our Dreams [3]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: ...or at least one idiot in love, Alternate Universe - High School, Crushes, Denial of Feelings, Idiots in Love, M/M, Tag force, abandoned dorm before abandoned, characters in vrains going to duel academy, jury’s out on the second idiot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 22:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30096213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatersalad5001/pseuds/tatersalad5001
Summary: “The Tag Force tournament’s coming up in a couple of months,” Yusaku told Takeru. “Duelists will be teaming up for tag duels. Teams will be betting medals to try to collect the most. Some students are teaming up on Sundays to practice tag dueling before then. They’re in the duel arena in the main building right now, I think.”“I thought you didn’t have time to make friends.” Kusanagi snorted. “Guess that changed when the new transfer student turned out to be cute.”
Relationships: Fujiki Yuusaku/Homura Takeru
Series: For Our Dreams [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1297850
Kudos: 4





	Bit Shoot

**Author's Note:**

> This is a continuation of Chapter 4 (Day 7) from Candles Lighting Up the Darkness, which you can find here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113856/chapters/40253054
> 
> Candles Lighting Up the Darkness is I think from a bunch of prompts from an older rarepair week on tumblr. Back when Yusaku/Takeru was considered a rarepair (after it wasn’t, I used Aoi/Miyu a different year). This particular prompt was a crossover prompt or something similar, so I ended up making up an AU where they’re going to Duel Academy. They’re both slifer students, Takeru’s the new transfer student, their dorms are next to each other, you know.
> 
> It’s sort of a Tag Force 1 AU, actually. Tag Force 1 has a Tag Force tournament where students take place in Tag Duels to try to win. Every Sunday in the game, you have the chance to practice Tag Duels before the tournament. That’s where this fic kicks off, almost immediately after where I left off in the original fic; Yusaku and Takeru are on their way to practice Tag Duels. 
> 
> This is one of the prompts that I ended up having the inspiration to continue, so I finally got around to it. I finished this a few months ago, I’ve just been working on uploading a backlog of fics I haven’t uploaded/updated and thankfully I’m almost done. I have no idea if this is going to have more chapters or not, I’ll leave it at a hard maybe. Anyway, thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy!

Yusaku honestly hadn't been sure how he'd been planning to spend his Sunday, but he definitely hadn't planned to spend it practicing Tag Duels partnered with the new transfer student. He didn't care about Tag Duels at all. He could think of probably three hundred other things he'd rather be doing. But for some reason, he'd been unable to say no when Takeru asked him to be his partner. 

Kusanagi could claim it was because Yusaku thought Takeru was ‘cute’ all he wanted. That was not the case. 

(It was maybe a little bit the case. Yusaku refused to admit it to himself.)

When they reached the stadium where the practice duels were being held, Takeru faced the room with a smile. “Who should we duel first?" 

Yusaku trailed behind him, trying (and failing) to hide how worn out he was. Why did the transfer student want to run the whole way here? "We should take a break first.” 

Takeru laughed. "You're really funny,” he told Yusaku, even though Yusaku definitely hadn't been joking. “Hmm... if we're both Osiris students, maybe we should try to look for another pair of reds as well. See how we measure up against our own dorm. 

"That makes sense,” Yusaku agreed. Takeru didn’t seem to want to say it but Osiris were also the worst dorm. As a new team, it made sense to seek out a weaker team for their first duel. 

It didn't take that long to find an opposing team meeting their standards. "So, you’re looking for some Osiris on Osiris action!" one of their opponents asked.

“Please don't say it like that,” Yusaku mumbled under his breath.

Yusaku and Takeru’s team won the duel. But Yusaku didn't feel like he won.

"You destroyed my monsters to activate your spell, but I had a different combo planned for them,” Yusaku pointed out to Takeru.

Takeru didn’t seem to feel like he won, either. “That’s funny, coming from you. I only started doing that because you started using all my cards without my permission. You didn’t even ask!”

Yusaku rose an eyebrow. “Isn’t the point of a Tag Duel to try to play your cards well with your teammate’s?”

“Teamwork is more than just using your partner’s cards!” Takeru ran a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. “You didn’t want me to destroy your cards? I didn’t want you using all my cards. If you asked, I would have said yes to some of them, but not all of them. I had really good combos planned, too. But halfway through the duel I figured if you were dishing it out, you could take it. I guess not, then.”

“What does it say about us that we lost to a team like them?” one of the opponents asked.

The other opponent shook their head. “They have good cards and skills individually, that’s all. They can’t beat every team like that. It was a close duel, anyway, thanks to our teamwork.”

Great. Even their opponents felt more victorious than they did. “Whatever. This seems like it’s not working out,” Yusaku said. “I don’t want to be here, anyway.”

“If you don’t want to be here, why did you agree to come with me?” Takeru sighed. “This could be salvageable. We could work on it, but if you don’t want to be here, there’s no point. We might as well leave.”

The two of them did leave. Takeru was clearly headed back for the Osiris dorms. Yusaku would prefer to go back to his room and complain to his roommate, but he didn’t want to walk the whole way there with the guy he was mad at. So he left in the opposite direction and let his feet and mind wander.

Yusaku honestly didn’t have an answer for the question, even now. Why did he want to practice Tag Duels with Takeru? He just hadn’t felt like he could say no, but there had to be a reason he’d felt that way. He had no problem telling people ‘no’, and did it all the time. So where did this feeling come from? The closest he had was still Kusanagi’s joke about a crush, and that idea just frustrated him further. He had no time to entertain any sort of crush that he may or may not have. (He was definitely leaning towards the not side, but better to leave it open until he knew for sure what it actually was). It would just be a waste of time, and Yusaku had wasted enough time already.

He stopped walking. His feet brought him to the other Blue Dorm. The last place an Osiris student belonged. Yusaku didn’t care about the whole ranking system, but that didn’t make it stop existing. Better to go back to his room before someone saw him.

* * *

“So, what’s the reading?” Kusanagi asked him when Yusaku returned to their room. 

Yusaku pushed an extra button on his duel disk. He and Kusanagi had both modified their duel disks to register and record duel energy readouts from duels they participated in. He read out the result for his most recent duel, which was still the Tag Duel with Takeru. 

Kusanagi blinked. “That’s the most energy we’ve seen from any duel,” he commented.

“There were 4 people participating in the duel.”

“We’ve both taken part in duels with 4 participants before.” Kusanagi leaned forward in his chair. “What happened in that duel? What made it different?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Yusaku groaned. Of course the duel generated more duel energy. Of course it did so that he’d have to talk about it, which was the exact opposite of what he wanted to do.

Kusanagi was not sympathetic to his plight. “Well, I guess I can’t make you. But it’s the only way we can make any progress right now, so I’d much rather you did.”

There wasn’t a good way out of this, was there? “I don’t know how it generated so much, it was nothing special. Dueled against a couple of other people in this dorm. We won, but he started using my cards like they were his, without caring what I wanted to use them for. When I pointed it out, he said I’d already been doing the same thing. Clearly we weren’t going to work out, so we left.”

Kusanagi stared at Yusaku. “Did you even ask him if it was okay to use his cards when you used them?”

“The point of a Tag Duel is to use your cards with your partner’s cards to duel as well as possible.” When Kusanagi continued to stare at Yusaku, giving no response, Yusaku answered his question. “No.”

“That’s not the point of a Tag Duel. You’re supposed to work together with your teammate, not just use their cards however you want. Teamwork requires communication, like asking if it’s okay to use their cards. I’m surprised you missed your own hypocrisy , by the way; it’s okay for you to use his cards, but not for him to use yours? Did you even try to work together and make the team work out, Yusaku? I know it’s hard for you to trust someone else to duel as well as you can, or to open up to anyone, but you can’t declare the team a failure if you didn’t even try.”

Yusaku hadn't wanted to try, really. “I don’t even know why I went.”

“Well, I’m glad you did,” Kusanagi told him. “It’s clear, though, that it wasn’t your strong teamwork that generated more duel energy. And we’ve both dueled against pairs that work well together before.”

Yusaku could feel something in his stomach drop. If it wasn’t him, teamwork, or their opponents, that only left one option. “It’s something about Takeru, isn’t it? Something about him, or his deck…”

“It’s a solid theory. We’ll need to test it, though. I hope you’re ready to apologize.”

* * *

Classes were boring at best, and awful at worst. Duel Academy did your average general education classes, with languages, history, math, and sciences if you wanted to call alchemy a general education (??) class. There was a cooking class, which was practical it nothing else. It was the dueling classes that were the worst, though. Multiple classes devoted to different mechanics and aspects of the game. Even dueling history. This was all well and good for most students of Duel Academy, but Yusaku was not most students. He wasn't here to duel, and he wasn't here for an education. He barely tuned into the classes he could handle, and slept through anything that involved dueling. As far as he was concerned, classes were just a waste of his time. He only came for appearances.

The last class of the day got out. Kusanagi, sitting nest to Yusaku, waved his hand in front of Yusaku’s face to make sure he was awake. Yusaku blinked; he was just about half-awake. Something resembling notes were scribbled down on the notebook in front of him, and Yusaku had no memory of doing so, but it was his handwriting. Before either one of them had gotten up, they both saw Takeru walk by their row to leave the room. Kusanagi gave Yusaku a meaningful look once Takeru was gone; right, yeah, Yusaku still needed to talk to him. He'd do it soon. 

Kusanagi had already packed away everything from class. Yusaku hadn't started. Kusangi got up and left the classroom as well. The two of them had different plans for the day. 

Yusaku had just wished packing away his things when someone sat down in the seat next to him. 

“So, what brought you to our dorm yesterday?" 

Yusaku tensed and looked over. One of the students from that Blue dorm was looking at him, a smile on his face. 

"Yusaku, right? I heard you get called on in class earlier. I'm Fubuki." Fubuki offered a handshake. Yusaku didn't move, but Fubuki didn't seem to mind.

"I'm not, like, mad or anything. I'm not one of these Obelisks that are like, “Osiris Red students should stay where they belong’ or anything, you know? But I never see you guys ground our dorm, and I saw you yesterday, and I recognized you today, and I'm just kind of curious. 

Well as long as this guy didn't care. "Was practicing Tag Duels. My teammate sad I had some issues so after we argued and left, I wasn't paying attention to where I was going.” 

"Arguing with your partner sucks." Fubuki winced sympathetically. "I partnered with my buddy Ryo one week. We had some, uh, creative difference, and now whenever I go practice on Sundays, I go with Fujiwara. The whole thing was a lot less fun before I switched partners.”

“I wasn’t there for fun.”

“Most duelists are there for fun. Why were you, then?”

This guy asked a lot of questions. Yusaku fished in his head for an answer. 

"Duel energy,” he settled on. “I'm interested in duel energy. " That was one way of putting it. "I thought an event like that might generale a lot it, a lot of duelists dueling in one place.”

"Did it?”

“I wouldn't know. I wasn't there long enough to find out.” That wasn’t enough, since Yusaku only got to measure the results of a single duel.

“Duel energy, So you're one of those types. My dorm has been researching Shadow Duels a lot lately. I wonder if there could be a connection between the two." 

Yusaku was still annoyed at the line of questioning from Atticus, but now it was his turn to ask a question. “Shadow Duels?”

“If you lose it's more than just your pride on your line. They say you lose your soul, " Atticus answered. “There's a lot we're still not sure on, like how they were started. Maybe it has something to do with duel energy. Maybe you should come help us out some time. " 

"Maybe I should."

Yusaku didn't know much about these Shadow Duels, but it seemed as plausible a theory as any. It was a good opportunity to learn more about duel energy, and that's why Yusaku came to Duel Academy in the first place. Not to duel, he'd never wanted to duel again, and only put up with it now to achieve his goals. No, he was here to learn more about duel energy.

Duel energy ruined his life, after all.

It ruined the life of Kusanagi’s brother, Jin, as well. Maybe if they could learn more about duel energy, maybe if they could figure out _why_ , they could finally move on.

* * *

It's an easy process. 

Knock on the door, apologize, make plans for Sunday. But Yusaku was stuck on step 1, because he didn't want to do step 2. 

His reluctance didn't mean he was nervous, or afraid of rejection. If he faced rejection, it would be a set back, but he would find a way around it. He was even less concerned about the reasons for the possible rejection. He didn't care about Taken's feelings. Yusaku was an emissary of revenge, not politeness. He wasn’t there to make friends. (He did care about Takeu's feelings. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, even to himself.)

He didn’t want to be here and do this. But he needed to, so better to get it over with. Yusaku knocked on the door. 

Takeru opened the door. He looked less than thrilled at recognizing Yusaku. "Oh. Hello."

“I wanted to apologize for the other day, I shouldn't have dueled the way I did, it was disrespectful to use your cards without communicating at all with you, and I should have trusted your own cards and strategies more. It was hypocritical of me to be upset about you dueling the same way I'd already been dueling. I was inconsiderate. I'm sorry." Yusaku had hit at least most of the points Kusanagi had said he should aim for while apologizing. He'd count that as a success. (He hoped he didn't come off as insincere, he really was trying.)

“I still shouldn’t have retaliated the way I did. I'm sorry, too,” Takeru said. “I appreciate your apology."

That threw Yusaku off. He didn't expect to receive an apology as well. "It’s... It's fine I, um deserved it. It wasn't really fair that I stopped you from trying out Tag Duels. I understand if you don't want me to be your teammate again, but if you do want to try again on Sunday, I will do my best to communicate better and try to work with you instead of, uh, what I did before." 

Takeru folded his arms together “...I'll think about it. Come back on Sunday and I'll give you my answer." 

It wasn't an outright rejection. Yusaku felt queasy for some reason. It wasn't an outright acceptance of the proposal, either. "Okay. "


End file.
